Posts Tagged ‘Issues’

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Miles Stroth: Listen Then Think

Monday, January 23rd, 2012

Listen4I take improv classes when I can, always from top-flight teachers. It helps me keep my edge by putting my performance under scrutiny and review that’s much more intense than what you or I experience in a workplace environment.  And it keeps me in a learning mode. You’ve probably never heard the name of my current teacher, Miles Stroth, but Miles is a legend in the improv community. He has influenced the art of improvisation as a performer and teacher, performed thousands of shows, taught thousands of students and changed the way they play the game.

I was struggling with my scenes in this week’s class, then had a little breakthrough in the last scene I did (we do dozens of scenes per class). The difference came about when I began by listening instead of thinking.

“Listen, then think,” says Miles. “Don’t try to make sense of the situation. Interact with it by listening.”

Here’s what happens when you think first instead of listening first:

You begin having a conversation about what’s in your head instead of about what’s in the scene. And because neither your scene partner(s) nor your audience can hear what’s in your head, you’re having a conversation with yourself, which distances you from the scene instead of engaging in it. You’re having a conversation with yourself.

Here’s what happens when you listen before thinking:

You can use your intellect to serve the scene (by doing something smart that propels the scene and makes your partner look good) instead of letting your intellect use you (”I am the smartest person in the room and here’s proof”). You’re having a conversation with reality.

Thinking is the ego talking; Listening is the world talking.

Listen. Then Think. That is the order of the opportunity in any scene you’re in.

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Posted in Coaching, Communication, Dialogue, Entrances, Focus, Fundamentals, Games, Initiations, Listening, Relationships, Scenes | 1 Comment »

Objectives vs. Outcomes cont’d

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

Tuesday night, we staged an invitation-only workshop for 25 friends, acquaintances and interested folks to let them experience the marvel that is GameChangers. After reviewing our performance, the GameChangers team’s consensus is that on this particular night we were not marvelous. We started 15 minutes late, got slow in the middle and rushed at the end. We felt that the experience was, at times, less than riveting for our audience.  A couple of people spent an inordinate amount of time on their mobile devices, and we know for a fact they were not tweeting about how great it all was.

Specific notes:

- After cautioning the audience at the beginning of the presentation about long monologues as a means of communicating, I wrapped up the presentation with a long monologue.

- Our direction was soft on a couple of the exercises. This resulted in a kind of sponginess in the middle of the two-hour session, with drawn-out explanations by Antonio and me, less focus by the teams, and a rushed ‘third act’ in the last 15 mins.

- As any improviser can tell you, you have to work on pieces of the process at a time. You cannot drop everything you know on your audience all at once. In my explanation of what we call ‘the orchestral model’ of business communication, and the concept we call ‘quantum narrative,’ I got into more detail than the audience was able to absorb in such a short window. ‘Too clever by half,”as they say in Blighty. ‘Ten pounds of potatoes in a five pound bag,” as they say in Boise.

- The teamwork that usually happens during our workshops was not so much apparent in this one. Things stayed more individualized, and less knit-together than we would like.

- The tempo at which we conducted the session was inconsistent. If I had been conducting a piece of music, it would have been in about 20 different time signatures, with me conducting at least part of the performance with my back to the orchestra. Missing cues. Dynamics roller-coastery instead of scenic.

These notes are related to our business objective for the workshop, which was to explain GameChangers and give attendees a sampling of what we do with our clients. At achieving this objective, we give ourselves a 50%. We were only about half as effective as we believe we’re capable of being.

So why are we not upset?

Two reasons: One is that because our process lets us see so clearly where the issues are, we have already taken steps to remedy them before the next open workshop.

The other, bigger, reason is that the outcomes of the session have been extraordinary, better than the outcomes of many workshops where our performance was actually  much better than it was Tuesday. A lot of credit for this goes to the people who were in attendance. One of the points we make in these introductions to GameChangers is to distinguish between objectives of the game, and the outcomes of the game, and wow, has that been our experience since Tuesday.

These are some of the outcomes:

- Our friend Ron Finley, the ‘renegade urban gardener’ connected with our friends Jenna and Adam from TakePart, who were in attendance. TakePart is the digital division of Participant Media. They are going to do a story about Ron.

- Erin Reilly, the creative director of USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, spoke yesterday to her faculty committee about having us do a one-day workshop there in March.

- Marcy and Strath Hamilton of Tri-Coast Studios, which is producing a lot of e-books, met a Ruby on  Rails coder named Patrick Maddox, who was in attendance Tuesday.  They’ve been looking for a coder. Now they’re talking to Patrick.

- T.H. Culhane and David Groder, who are working on a robotics education program funded by the U.S. Naval Research Dept., are making a presentation today (Wednesday) at Washington High School in Los Angeles, and are being joined by Ron Finley, who is a Washington High graduate. This is happening as a result of them connecting on Tuesday night.

- T.H. and Groder will soon get introduced by GameChangers associate Jamal Williams, who was in town from D.C. for the Tuesday workshop, to Nii Simmonds, the ‘Nubian Cheetah,’ a Ghanian-born D.C. resident and former investment banker who funds a program called Afrobotics, a robotics competition for African schoolchildren.

- Kevin Wall, who is producing the opening ceremonies and concert for the 2014 World Cup in Rio, was in attendance. Kevin learned for the first time that Fernando Godoy, who used to be an intern in at one of Kevin’s companies, is today a successful internet entrepreneur in Sao Paulo and is a partner in Spirit of Football 2014. Kevin and Fernando are going to meet the next time Kevin is in Brazil.

- Tri-Coast Productions and GameChangers are meeting this coming Monday to discuss two projects–a GameChangers ebook and a video series that would be produced and performed by people from our network of world-class improvisers.

- Andy Sternberg has since Tuesday introduced us to two friends of his whom he believes will be interested in our work.

- We were able to continue a conversation with Nicholle McClelland Betelier, a marketing officer from IdeaLab, that began at a yoga retreat in December.

- A crypto-hipster named Som showed up uninivited, and asked some of the best questions and offered some of the most thoughtful comments of the evening. Thank you, Som, whoever and wherever you are! Please stay in touch!

- My favorite outcome of the evening came about thanks to a ‘gift’ from David Groder. At the very end of the session, after my long-winded closing monologue, Groder asked if we could go around the room and have everyone introduce themselves. All 25 people introduced themselves and described the work they’re doing. It was really remarkable, not only because it completely subverted the normal order of things—introductions at the end instead of the beginning!—but also because the people in attendance are doing brilliant things in the world. Attendees are working in robotics, social media, community development, urban gardening, fashion, cause-related marketing, transmedia storytelling, architecture, criminal law, venture capital, entertainment, academia, e-books, tech, watercraft stabilization, app development, etc. etc. etc. Introductions at the end became a very enjoyable kind of reveal. Almost everyone stayed and talked for half-an-hour or more after the session, and I believe most of that conversation would not have happened if not for David’s gift to the scene.

Never get objectives confused with outcomes. Objectives are what we use to assess and improve our performance. Outcomes happen as a result of having performed. Objectives are finite. Outcomes are unlimited. Objectives create focus. Outcomes generate value.

Post-event conversations were the most productive part of the evening

Post-event conversations were the most productive part of the evening

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Posted in Coaching, Communication, Education, Fundamentals, Games, Gifts, Issues, Narrative, Objectives, Problem Solving, Scenes, Social Media, Suggestions From the Audience, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

JIM ROME’S JUNGLE GAMES

Friday, August 12th, 2011

RexGame1Huge fan of Jim Rome’s work here. Guy has as much game as any sports journalist, ever. The depth of knowledge, the richness of the vocabulary, the energy and focus and the network he’s built are awesome. His interviews with sports personalities and scenes with his ‘Clones’ (what he calls his audience) who hang out in ‘the Jungle,’ (his network), are great examples of improvisation at work. Listen and add. Yes and. Make statements. Listening to Rome is like watching Dwayne Wade in the open court with a basketball. If you like sports, the Jungle is always a good hang.

Rome and his radio production team recently played a 20-show game they dubbed “The Rex Game.’ One of his producers noticed one day that they’d had someone named Rex on three consecutive shows. An improviser, seeing such a pattern, has one response: Do more! That’s what Rome and Team did, they kept interviewing Rex’s.

For 20 consecutive shows, they interviewed someone named Rex. Imagine how much bullshit a game like this cuts through in production meetings. How it swept subjectivity, judging, opinionating, credit-claiming and ego out of the room like the Red Sox do the Yankees at Fenway. “We have a guest.” “Who?” “Rex.” “Book it.”

How easy is that? compared to, let’s say…

“We have a guest.” “Who.” “A soccer player. She’s interesting.” “How interesting?” “Real interesting.” “To you she’s interesting because she’s hot. But this is radio. Does she have a take?.”  “She has a take.” “What kind of a take?” “A good take.” “How good?” Etc. etc. etc.

Rome summed up the benefits of the Rex Game like this: “You don’t get to 20 Rexes without stretching a little bit.”

Exactly. Extension is what you want out of a game. Doing something you’ve never done before in order to get where you’ve never gone before. That’s what improvisation is all about.

Interestingly, when Rome got requests from callers and his producers for him to play another similar game, say a Derek Game, Rome riffed on it for a bit, “Derek Jeter, Derek Harper, Derek Coleman, Derek and the Dominoes…” and then quickly decided against it. This is an excellent example of a clean edit, something else Rome does exceptionally well. His transitions are clear. He never meanders.

UPDATE: Though Rome decided against the Derek Game, he and his team are playing a Kyle Game, interviewing someone named Kyle for as many days in a row as they can. Just more proof of how much game the Rome team has. As the great improviser, Craig Cackowski, says, “Don’t look for the game. Look for a game.”

The Jungle is full of game  You can always let go of one vine and grab another. Just make sure you have a take when you do, because the Jungle can be a cruel place when you don’t.

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Posted in Communication, Creativity, Games, Movement | No Comments »

Walking Western Avenue

Monday, June 6th, 2011

We live and work in what you’d call the northern edge of South-Central Los Angeles, in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods, West Adams.  Western Avenue, the main north-south artery nearest us, is one of my favorite streets in Los Angeles. If you want to get a feel for this city, there’s no better way to do it than to travel the length of Western Avenue.  From the exclusive girls school up in the hills on its northern end to the hustle and flow of the ‘hood in the south, and every immigrant dream in between, Western is a ribbon of culture lining the belly of this beast of a city.

PFFlyers1I’m doing a photo essay on Western Avenue for a client of ours. In walking Western yesterday, I had all kinds of rewarding encounters. A street poet named Ron shared a poem he wrote, called Shine that was amazing; a restaurant owner grilling chicken on the sidewalk shared stories of his adventures in the real estate biz; a beauty shop owner opened the door after hours to pose for a photo; a kid showed me his python; another kid getting a tattoo showed me his cool shoes–PF Flyers, a brand I used to wear when I was a kid!; a clothing entrepreneur named Prince confided his strategy for pumping up slow sales; a dude named Noon and I had a half-hour discussion on privacy issues, the school system, the prison system, and the relations between the police and the people of South Central–all because he wouldn’t let me take his picture.

No matter how deeply we dive into virtual worlds and other dimensions of reality, walking around and having conversations with folks is still the best way to learn something you didn’t know.

As Viola Spolin said, “Act on environment, and environment will act on you.”

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Posted in Communication, Creativity, Dialogue, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Gifts, Issues, Listening | No Comments »

Revolution 2.0

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

We don’t normally delve into politics here, but what’s happening right now in Egypt is too universally relevant to ignore.  So park your politics at the door and drink up…

WaelGhonim1

Wael Ghonim

Wael Ghonim, Google’s marketing manager for the Middle East and North Africa, had been held captive by the Egyptian government for 12 days.   Recently released, he has been doing interviews describing what’s going on his country in which he describes it as an internet revolution, ‘Revolution 2.0′  is the name he has given it.  Here’s a 5-minute CNN interview with him (sorry for the link out, embedding has been disabled).

‘Revolution 2.0′ is a classic example of how a scene breaks down when a leader doesn’t share the narrative with a team.  It doesn’t matter whether the scene plays out over 30 years, as with Mubarak’s reign, or whether it’s the duration of your company’s offsite, the dynamic is the same:  Scenes in which one player tries to script and control the narrative are doomed to fall apart in a networked environment.

Not that I’m putting myself in the same lame league as a world-class scene hog like Hosni Mubarak, but ’scripting’ is my own biggest challenge as an improviser performing on stage.  For much of my career, I got paid for telling stories.  I made a career out of coming up with ideas that others on my team were tasked with implementing.  I led by articulating a vision that others would follow.

And then…

Through improvisation I have come to see that when you participate in a narrative without controlling it, the stories tell themselves.  I understand now that collaboration is the shortest path to implementation.  I realize that vision is only as good as what you can see in the moment, and that the best leadership is actually skillful following in disguise.

‘Revolution 2.0′ is a demonstration of the power of a shared narrative, and a global referendum on what leadership will look like in the Networked World. The Egyptian narrative belongs to the Egyptian people and the harder Hosni Mubarak works at controlling it, the more obvious this fact is going to become.

(UPDATE:  AT 8 AM PST ON FEB 11, 2011, HOSNI MUBARAK RESIGNED.  THE PEOPLE OF EGYPT ARE OVERJOYED.  CONGRATS TO WAEL GHONIM AND ALL EGYPTIANS ON THE END OF A BAD SCENE AND THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ONE!)

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Posted in Communication, Issues, Leadership, Problem Solving, Scenes, story | No Comments »

Sweet Spot

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

GolfBallTee1I used to play a lot of golf, and the game taught me a lot.  One bit of wisdom came my way one Sunday afternoon from a golfer named Jim Bishop, while he and I were playing the classic old Wilson Course at Griffith Park in Los Angeles.  He told me that one reason he plays golf is that it that offers a person the chance to experience perfection.  “Every now and then,” he said, “you make a perfect swing.”  As any golfer who took the game seriously would, I understood exactly what Bishop was talking about.

On occasions, something amazing happens in the game of golf, when you transcend the conscious boundaries of all your prior experiences with the game, let go of your expectations, and become a passenger on the boat of your own brilliance.  You experience the patient takeaway, the coiling in the hips, the shoulders in perfect orbit around the spine, your back leg buttressed like a telephone pole, until you are behind the ball and then, your entire being uncoils through the ball, not swinging at it as much as passing a wave of energy through it, and in immortal words of Carl Spackler, “Cinderella story. Outta nowhere.”  There it is.  You feel it for just an instant.  Perfection.

A golfer pays a price to get there, because most often golf is crap and collapse, frustration, bad behavior and the sudden and unexplainable disappearance of one’s powers.  In other words, it’s a lot like life, which why everyone should play golf at some point in their lives.  It teaches you a lot about how to persist in the face of adversity.

Like the game of golf, the work we do requires a lot of patience and, like golf, work is all about managing adverse events.  The professional golfer, Frank Beard, once said that he hit exactly the same good shots an amateur golfer hits, he just hit more of them.  The same is true with our work.  Success looks the same for everyone.  You make money.  You enjoy the interactions.  You go home happy.  It is the consistency of our game, and the ability to manage adversity, that distinguishes the real players from the weekenders.

It doesn’t matter how great a player you are, there are times when you just have to take an unplayable lie, stroke and penalty, or when you find yourself out of bounds and have to hike back to the tee and start all over, stroke and distance.

Then there are times when work comes together like the perfect swing.  When your biggest client calls to thank you for solving a couple of problems, your oldest client makes things new again, and your newest client signs the contract.  When a friend makes news for doing something cool and funny.  When you begin a journey that is going to take four years and promises no end of excitement.  When you get to study with one of your favorite teachers for two hours.  When you have tickets with friends for a great concert tonight.

This is one of those days for me, and I wish you all the same.  Because we all know that soon enough we’ll be hooking them deep into alligator country again, trying to locate our ball in places where, as Lee Trevino once said, “there’s things with no shoulders living in there” and be asking ourselves why in the hell we put ourselves through it.

We put ourselves through it because we are promised times when perfection smiles on us, and we experience the satisfaction of seeing ourselves and the games we play in a new light, when we are capable of doing, in the context of the game, what we had only dreamed about before.

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Posted in Coaching, Creativity, Focus, Fundamentals, Games, Innovation, Issues, Problem Solving | No Comments »

Not Making It Up as we Go Along

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

Some of my favorite GameChangers are working these days in New Orleans.  As we are going to see eventually with Detroit, artists cannot resist large blank canvases, storytellers chaos, designers dead space, or musicians dead air.  The seeds of innovation are best sowed on dormant ground.  This is where we find the opportunities for new growth, for the expansions of understanding and ability.

This slide was presented as part of a seminar in New Orleans attended and photographed by our friend, Ray Nichols:GodinSlide1

I love a lot of stuff coming out of New Orleans (current bad news about the oil disaster excepted), but I don’t love this slide.  Those of us who design improvisation for business spend too much time already dispelling misconceptions about what we do, and this is the single biggest misconception, that improvisation is “making it up as you go along” a.k.a. winging it, a.k.a. flying by the seat of one’s pants, a.k.a. spewing whatever comes to mind.

In fact, improvisation is specifically not ‘making it up as you go along.’  It is contrary to the idea of making it up as you go along.  It is, rather, a process for acting on one’s environment in a substantive and productive way to generate positive unforeseen outcomes.  One’s environment is not ‘made up’ as one goes along.   It is real, just as the reality of one’s scene partners is real.  They are not making stuff up.  They are dealing with reality, just like you are.   Deal with it.

There are, in fact, many other ways to “make it up”  besides “as you go along.”  There is making it up ahead of time and trying to get followers to go along.  There is making it up after the fact and hoping history goes along.  And there’s making it up in your head, and trying to get your heart to go along.   All of these are realities that must be addressed in any business narrative.

The quote by Godin suggests a divide between planning and spontaneity, between fact and fiction, when in fact business, and life itself, is a balancing act, a continuum, between the two.  Most actions in business are calculated to a fault, and rely too heavily on planning.  (Maybe that is the point of Godin’s quote.)  The purpose, however, of applying improvisation principles to business is not to say, “Forget your planning and your calculations, ignore your research and your institutional memory, because…hey,  we’re going to make this up as we go along.”  That would be disastrous on many levels.  What improvisation says is do your planning but emphasize preparation, because every plan changes, and it’s your ability to adapt to change that will determine your success.

Business improvisation liberates the unconscious mind, but does not disconnect from an awareness of history, environment or context.  It is informed by, but not totally beholden to the numbers, the data, and the rational mind.

The essential message of improvisation is this:  Don’t make it up.  Make it real.  Then act on that reality.

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Creativity, Environment, Innovation, Narrative, Problem Solving | 2 Comments »

Digg the Toyota Scene

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

When Toyota hit the icy patch in their narrative this January, they did not do what most organizations their size would do, they didn’t do what the Tiger Woods brand did when the Escalade hit the fire hydrant:  huddle, confer, strategize, ponder, debate, script, re-write, close ranks, assume a defensive posture, call in damage control experts, and use all of it as an excuse for Not Doing Anything.

No, they improvised.  And by that, I don’t mean they flew by the seat of their pants, or made it up as they went along.  From the CEO on down, they jumped into the conversation with the audience and performed aggressively to build a narrative that countered the media hysteria around the recall and the ambulance-chasing members of the legal profession who fanned its flames.ToyotaLogos1

This is what improvisation is.  A conversation designed to connect the performers with their community.  Not a monologue, a strategy, a script or a campaign.  A dialogue. Observations and comments.  Listening and responding.  Action and reaction.

AdWeek this week highlights one component of Toyota’s conversation with the audience:  a Digg Dialogg with Toyota’s head of U.S. Sales, Jim Lentz.  One of the more telling beats in the article is how skeptical J.D. Power & Associates, the traditional arbiter of performance and quality in the automotive industry is about this tactic.  They don’t see ‘movement’ in their polls, they say.  The jury is still out, they say.  What the J.D. Power people fail to grasp is that the conversation itself is the movement.  The fact that it happened, along with untold other interactions between the brand and audience, constitute a flow of events that defy any one snapshot’s (i.e. poll’s) ability to capture its effectiveness.  Trying to measure one data point in a narrative with a million data points is foolish.  J. D. Powers is trying to apply old school metrics to a new school process.  It’s like taking a poll about how people feel about Rings and using it to gauge the audience’s perception of Lord of the Rings.

No doubt there’s a major problem with Toyota’s process, the company has admitted as much.  Its quantity got ahead of its quality.  It began thinking of its audience as consumers instead of customers.  It’s a big, big, issue, with immense implications for the brand.  What’s impressive is that they didn’t let the immensity overwhelm them.  They didn’t look for an epic solution to the epic problem.  Rather, they began a journey of epic proportions., and they are conducting it one conversation, one scene, at a time.  They are contrite, but they are not backpedaling, or wasting time deliberating.  That would cause the narrative to lose its momentum.  They didn’t script a narrative and then try to force it on the audience.  They improvised, with the conviction that their journey will eventually re-connect them with their community, and win back its confidence and its applause for their performance.

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Posted in Branding, Communication, Dialogue, Issues, Listening, Narrative, Problem Solving, Sales, Scenes, Themes | 1 Comment »

Over Under Sideways Down

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

One of the characteristics of networks is their flexibility. What our communication channels looked like yesterday may not be what they look like today. This, of course, can be an asset or a liability. The net that allows us to build new relationships, discover markets and expand our potential for taking productive action is the same one that swallows channels and markets like a singularity sucking down solar systems in nanoseconds.  The global financial system, guaranteed, is right now teetering on the edge of such a debt-and-greed-spun vortex.  Call it The Bank Hole.

TheBankHole1In our crazy race to escape these kinds of vortexes, we can turn direction-blind.  We pick a course of action, or someone picks a course for us, and in our all-out effort to escape a certain fate, we go heads down as hard as we can for as long as we can in that direction, like barn-sour horses galloping toward a distant barn.  A strategy, as Umair Haque points out in his latest HBR post, can be just as bad as a locked-in direction, because it can confine or limit one’s options instead of liberating them.

What Haque advocates, and what we could not agree with more, is adopting a set of behaviors (he calls these behaviors ‘Wisdom’) that foster liberation of the ideas and the ethical actions that can deliver us from the Goldman-Sachs Singularity, and whatever else sucks.  These behaviors have no time frame, because they are timeless.  They cannot be quantified, because they are potentially limitless in number.

One of these behaviors (me, adding to Haque’s list) is to Envision.   And by that I don’t mean Ayn Rand’s old Burt Lancaster-as-One-Of-A-Kind-Genius concept of vision but what I call ‘Viola Vision’, which consists of ’seeing and sharing what we see.’  This kind of envisioning expands our horizons, and gives us infinitely more options for escaping what sucks.  So in your quest for solutions, don’t forget to:

Look over. It’s how you get perspective on a problem.

Look under. Play with the dynamic of concealment and revelation.  Respect roots.  Dig deep.

Look sideways. My friend, the animation director John Musker, talks about stories as ‘taking an unexpected left turn.’  A sideways move can shake up your narrative in a way that keeps you on your toes and your audience engaged.

Look down. Who needs a helping hand?  Some days, this the only question worth answering.

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Posted in Communication, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Fundamentals, Games, Innovation, Issues, Leadership, Movement, Narrative, Networked World, Relationships, Scenes | 2 Comments »

‘The President’s Question Time’ Scene

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

There’s a great tradition in British government that, if you’ve never seen it, you ought to.  It’s called The Prime Minister’s Question Time, and it is wonderful political theater.  Watch some of this.

And then compare this.

Quite a difference.

The first is improvised.

The second is scripted.

Improvisation is active.  It is alive.  Members of Parliament are energetically engaged in the conversation about the matter at hand, supportive of, but not bogged down by, their various ideologies and positions.  Their actions and reactions are immediate, emotional and visceral.  This honors the problem.  American politicians dishonor a problem, and obfuscate it, when they use it as a foil for politicking, which is how almost every problem faced by the federal government is regarded now.  An excuse for campaigning.

ObamaRepubs1This is the big point President Obama underlined yesterday in his meeting with the Republicans.  That 66-minute conversation may be the best thing that’s happened in American politics since the Watergate hearings.  Obama changed the game by calling out the current political game for what it is.   Let’s call the current game “Our Way or No Way.”  It is played by Democrats and Republicans alike, with equal vigor.  This game is toxic.  Limiting.  Stultifying.  Divisive.  And ultimately it’s unproductive.  This is not about blaming one party or the other.  The bad game is to blame.

Yesterday, Obama not only called out the current game for the quicksand pit it is, he suggested a better, more liberating, more productive game.  You might call the game he’s proposing, ‘Part of a Pie is Better Than None.’  In other words, the invitation to the Republicans (Dems, you’re next!) is to find an area of agreement and agree on it.  Do it knowing that some, but not all, and probably not not 80% of what you’ve got scripted, will come to pass.  Don’t be greedy.  Be generous instead.  Don’t place blame.  Accept responsibility.  Don’t point fingers.  Shake hands.  And then come out fighting.  Let’s relish the good fight, one where we fight together to solve the problem, not the bad fight, where we fight over who’s right and who’s wrong about how to solve it.  Let’s pick battles we can win instead of battles we can make the other guy lose.

Cheers to the GameChanger in Chief for changing the game once again.  Our political discourse needs more of the kind of energetic, intelligent, articulate, performances that the Brits demonstrate in their ‘Question Time With the Prime Minister” and Obama and the Republicans staged yesterday.  It will be a healthy transformation.  And it’ll make great TV.  Nothing we Yanks like better than that!

Do not get locked into your script for success.  Be prepared, instead, to improvise your way there.  Remember that other people have scripts, too.  As I can tell you from working in the entertainment business, when all we do is fight over whose script we’re going to follow, the show does not go on.

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Posted in Agreement Principle, Communication, Dialogue, Fundamentals, Games, Issues, Leadership, Narrative, Scenes | 2 Comments »

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